We had such a lovely afternoon last Saturday 10 Feb 2018, despite the weather! There was a very good turn out. We had the hug inside as the weather was so awful. We all joined hands and sang ‘All you need is love’, drank tea, ate biscuits and told stories of why these buildings are so important to us.

Why have the Hug?

The Granville/Carlton buildings have been central to South Kilburn life for many years. Brent Council voted to to tear them down July 2016. The community together was able to win a temporary reprieve. Now we want to save these buildings for South Kilburn permanently! And part of that is coming together to show our appreciation for them

The Granville /Carlton buildings have been central to SK life for many years. The Council voted to to tear them down July 2016. The community together was able to win a temporary reprieve. Lets save these buildings for SK permanently! Show your appreciation for these buildings. Join us 10 Feb 3pm BIG HUG

A Joyful and Restful Holiday time to Everyone!

Granville Community Kitchen Friday Night Meals will be back

Friday 12 January 2018 at The Carlton Centre… See you then!

On 23 November 2017 Granville Community Kitchen, The Otherwise Club and the South Kilburn Community held a ‘funeral’ for the Main Hall, a place built for and used by the community for over 120 years. It is now being turned into an Enterprise Hub by the South Kilburn Trust and Brent Council, used as office space with a hole cut into the middle of the floor to link the upper and lower floors of the building. It will no longer be a community event space.

Poems were read and a song sung. This is Dee’s poem

Granville Dedication

As the leaves turn to flaming shades of oranges and red, golden yellows and brown

And fall from the trees

As the days get shorter and the nights get

Deeper and darker

As the winds blow stronger and colder

Signalling the end of autumn,

A time of harvest and abundance

We stand in this circle

Of time and existence

We celebrate the Granville

We mark the end of the Granville as we know it

We stand in that place between

what was and what will be

We stand hopeful of new beginnings

This is our time as family, as community

To rest, to come together, to strengthen our connections

To plan, to dream….

We stand in hope of new beginnings

Our lights symbols of all our hopes and celebration of the Granville

We buried a time capsule. Many people Put something in it that reminded them of South Kilburn, The Granville and The Main Hall. This drawing was one young person’s offering.

The time capsule was ceremonially buried with people of all ages throwing earth on it.

the Kilburn Times reported the event:

The Otherwise Club and Granville Community Kitchen Friday Night Meals and Garden Project will continue through the winter. Our Friday Night Meals have moved to Carlton Centre next door. EVERY FRIDAY NIGHT 5.45-7.15 up to and including 15 December. It will then stop for the holidays until 12 January 2018. The Otherwise Club activities have moved to William Dunbar Tenant Hall and The Salvation Army Hall

Meanwhile all our stuff is moved out and the walls are coming down…. Very sad.

Wednesday 22 November 6-8pm we are hosting Kitchen Table Talks. Free Food. Donations welcome. Join us at the Granville Community Kitchen for our Kitchen Table Talks. Come and share a meal, and bring something to share with your neighbours! A dish, a story, a photo or even a poem or a song! Lets get to know each other and support each other in issues that affect us all. Our voices together are strong!

In December, our Friday night meal will move to Kilburn Park Junior School and continue while the Granville is closed for 3 months for refurbishment to open again in March 2018. Keep checking back for more information.

What a fantastic day! The Footprints, made with spray chalk, from Peel Precinct to Granville were wonderful! All the children noticed them and played with them. Everything from the bubbles and Samba in Peel Precinct to the the gardening at Granville topped off with entertainment after our community meal at Granville brought us together and all organised by the young people from The Otherwise Club! You were great! Thank you to all the organisers, volunteers and everyone who came and made it such a great day!

Some photos from the day…

The words to the ‘Community’ Song the young people from The Otherwise Club wrote with Rik, Rose and Jess. Says it all!

The documentary, “The Power of Community – How Cuba Survived Peak Oil,” This film tells of the hardships and struggles as well as the community and creativity of the Cuban people during this difficult time. Cubans share how they transitioned from a highly mechanized, industrial agricultural system to one using organic methods of farming and local, urban gardens.

FRIDAY 30 JUNE, 2017 FOOTPRINT FAIR from 2pm

Lots to do from 2pm in Peel Precinct and all free! Drumming, games and crafts.

At Granville there will be stalls about People’s Food Policy and South Kilburn People’s Plan as well as planting activities, games for children and tea,coffee and cakes.

In the evening, after our normal Friday night meal , there will be some entertainment including spoken word, poetry , music and a premier of a short film about The Granville!

Granville Community Centre, Granville Community Kitchen and The Otherwise Club members and supporters are all devastated by the fire and know that it has huge implications for all of us but don’t know what they are or how to move forward.

We started taking donations at 3pm last Thursday and we weer full by 8pm that day. We are overwhelmed by the generosity of stuff, time and work to help others that we have seen and we are far from the core of the work being done..

We have community in London.

We found these 2 writings about the event that say something of what we would like to say. We share them with you here in hopes that they speak to you too.

From Elli Kontorravdis, Policy and campaign Manager, Scotland

Can we just get a few things straight – the Grenfell Tower fire was not just a terrible accident, it was an inevitable consequence of Conservative government policy, rooted in structural racism.

The Conservatives voted down amendments to legislation that sought to make buildings like Grenfell quite literally ‘fit for human habitation’. You should know that one of those Conservatives is now the Police & Fire Minister and is 1 of 72 Conservative MPs who are also residential landlords.

Instead of being mandated to provide basic safety infrastructure, like sprinklers or fire escapes, which residents of Grenfell had been demanding for years, the building managers focused their attention on the external appearance, spending nearly £9mn – including installing cladding which is believed to have perversely made the Tower more flammable – the cavity between the cladding and building acting as a chimney.

The 600 residents of Grenfell Tower, were low income and largely BAME.

Our thoughts must be with the families and communities that were knowingly failed, and the firefighters & healthcare professionals doing their best to respond – despite also having been all but dismantled by the Conservatives.

Can we trust the Conservatives to negotiate the most significant constitutional and legal reform in living memory?’

From Payl Watt, Reader in Urban Studies, Birkbeck, University of London

We built buildings in the 70s, those 70s buildings – many of them should be demolished.”

I was interviewed yesterday evening by a journalist who began with the question ‘aren’t these tower blocks terrible because the people living in them are all poor?’ – ergo knock em’ down in order to ‘help’ the poor people by taking em’ out of ‘their’ slums.

Instead it’s really a problem caused by lack of money (long-term under-investment coupled with shorter-term austerity cuts and penny pinching), coupled with abuse of power since council estate tenants/residents are routinely not listened to and treated with disrespect by local politicians and housing officials.

It’s astounding – and should be a cause of great concern on the part of council housing residents and great shame on the part of politicians – that 17 years after New Labour’s Decent Homes programme began in 2000 and was due to be completed by 2010 in which all social rental homes had to be able to meet certain minimum standards (which weren’t even that generous), there is still a hefty Decent Homes backlog nationally, especially in London.

The latest available data (2015-16) shows that nearly 80,000 local authority homes in England and nearly 40,000 in London failed to meet Decent Homes standards (latest data on Data on Decent Homes attached). This includes 746 LA homes in RBKC. Decent Homes includes Health and safety standards for rented homes (HHSRS – introduced 2004 Housing Act) which themselves include fire risks. See here:

It’s absolutely crucial that this terrible event is not turned into yet ANOther excuse for demolition/social cleansing of estates by the political elite who are the ones responsible for the long-term problems that council estate tenants/residents face.